The Religion of the Ancient Celts eBook

and Segovesus, with many followers, to found new colonies
in Italy and the Hercynian forest.[46] Mythical as
this may be, it suggests the hegemony of one tribe
or one chief over other tribes and chiefs, for Livy
says that the sovereign power rested with the Bituriges
who appointed the king of Celticum, viz.
Ambicatus. Some such unity is necessary to explain
Celtic power in the ancient world, and it was made
possible by unity of race or at least of the congeries
of Celticised peoples, by religious solidarity, and
probably by regular gatherings of all the kings or
chiefs. If the Druids were a Celtic priesthood
at this time, or already formed a corporation as they
did later in Gaul, they must have endeavoured to form
and preserve such a unity. And if it was never
so compact as Livy’s words suggest, it must
have been regarded as an ideal by the Celts or by
their poets, Ambicatus serving as a central figure
round which the ideas of empire crystallised.
The hegemony existed in Gaul, where the Arverni and
their king claimed power over the other tribes, and
where the Romans tried to weaken the Celtic unity by
opposing to them the Aedni.[47] In Belgium the hegemony
was in the hands of the Suessiones, to whose king
Belgic tribes in Britain submitted.[48] In Ireland
the “high king” was supreme over other
smaller kings, and in Galatia the unity of the tribes
was preserved by a council with regular assemblies.[49]

The diffusion of the Ambicatus legend would help to
preserve unity by recalling the mythic greatness of
the past. The Boii and Insubri appealed to transalpine
Gauls for aid by reminding them of the deeds of their
ancestors.[50] Nor would the Druids omit to infuse
into their pupils’ minds the sentiment of national
greatness. For this and for other reasons, the
Romans, to whom “the sovereignty of all Gaul”
was an obnoxious watch-word, endeavoured to suppress
them.[51] But the Celts were too widely scattered
ever to form a compact empire.[52] The Roman empire
extended itself gradually in the consciousness of its
power; the cohesion of the Celts in an empire or under
one king was made impossible by their migrations and
diffusion. Their unity, such as it was, was broken
by the revolt of the Teutonic tribes, and their subjugation
was completed by Rome. The dreams of wide empire
remained dreams. For the Celts, in spite of their
vigour, have been a race of dreamers, their conquests
in later times, those of the spirit rather than of
the mailed fist. Their superiority has consisted
in imparting to others their characteristics; organised
unity and a vast empire could never be theirs.